How DNA Influenced My Manuscript Submittal

A month ago, as I sat before my computer working through a manuscript submittal, the last person I was thinking of was my birth father.

Late last spring, I sent the final draft of my debut memoir Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging off to the publisher. By June, the itch to launch a new writing project had me in a strangle hold. An idea had been flitting around in my head, but it hadn’t fully coalesced. Craving collaboration, I scoured my favorite writing programs and registered for Write-By-The-Lake Writer’s Retreat & Workshop at University Wisconsin-Madison.

Instead of meeting in Madison in June, I zoomed for five days with fellow, non-fiction writers and an able, inspiring instructor. We got to know one another and shared our writing via the all too familiar Brady Bunch squares on our screens. When the week closed, the scope of my writing project had crystallized: a blog2book memoir about closed adoption incorporating three years of my Touched By Adoption blogs. I was energized and motivated. But, by summer’s end the book project sat where I had left it in late June. In a file. On my computer.

To write my first book, I’d enrolled in Write Your Memoir in 6 Months (taught by Brooke Warner & Linda Joy Myers). Twice. The structure of the course and bi-monthly feedback had worked for me. As I chastised myself for not prioritizing my new writing goal, an email advertising an elite, year-long memoir program popped into my inbox. Opening it, I scrolled down. A lengthy application was required along with a fee. With an expected class size of twelve, I knew the chance of being accepted was slim, but the year of Covid-19 has taught me a few things: how to do everything virtually, how to deal with uncertainty, and to expect more of the unexpected.

I was convinced that the year-long program was just what I needed to craft my next book. Buckling down to the task of applying, I entered my book concept and working title, attached my latest author bio, and then uploaded the first ten pages of my manuscript. With all the hard steps complete, I focused on the form’s remaining questions.

“Enter your birthdate, *optional.”

Thoughts swirled in my head. By asking this, was the selection committee looking for older authors with a lifetime of experiences to reveal, seasoned voices who have oodles to reflect upon? Or was the program leaning towards selecting younger authors to nurture, writers with edgier tones who might express themselves in more experimental structures? Then again, perhaps the question meant the program had a bent towards selecting a cross section of students, so as to represent writers of all ages, voices, and writing styles.

I stared at the optional birthdate box. Should I enter just the day and month, or include my birth year?

What the heck, I reasoned. I am what I am: a middle-aged woman who is both a mother and a grandma; a lifelong journaler who found her birth relatives and realized she suddenly had a story to tell (one that someone might need to hear); and, a relative newbie to this online writing submission process. 

I tapped out the whole damn thing, birth year and all. Next question: Enter your race/ethnicity. 

For most of my life, this has been an easy question to answer. Adopted at three weeks old with my twin sister, our adoptive parents were told that we’d come from German and Irish ancestry. (We were born during the Baby Scoop Era–that time period after WWII until the 1980s–when adoption agencies tried to place adoptees into homes similar to those from where they originated.)  Our adoption was closed, which meant adoption statutes prevented us from knowing anything about our birth circumstances or our birth family. For half a century, I have identified with my adoptive parents’ heritage: German, Irish, and Bohemian.

All that changed in 2011.

After three years of search and stop efforts, my sister and I reunited with our birth mother; this process is the subject of my first book Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging. As a result of finding our birth mom, we learned that besides French and German, Cree Indian trickles through our maternal bloodline. When we located our birth dad, our genealogy expanded to include Scotland, Ireland, and another Native American tribe. One-quarter Chippewa, my birth dad grew up near a reservation in northern Minnesota. For the first fifty-five years of my life, I have had no choice but to claim “White” as my ethnicity, but now genetics has proven that I’m Native American, too.

So, as I contemplated the ethnicity box, breath built up in my chest. My hands twisted in my lap.

Since I had been honest about my age, I determined that for the first time in my life, I could and wanted to claim my rightful heritage. In the bleeping answer box, I typed in: White and Native American. Then I sat back in my desk chair and smiled at the screen. The grin was not due to the fact that I had chosen to be brazenly honest, nor was it pleasure over the newness of selecting Native American as my ethnicity on a form. It was something else entirely.

When I located my birth father in 2014, I had sent him a letter asking for family medical history. He complied by mail with this caveat: I may or may not be your biological father. Here’s the information you requested. Do not contact me again. Despite the efforts of my new half-siblings, my birth dad refused to acknowledge my twin and me as his offspring. 

Two years ago, the man who passed on his Native American ancestry to me died suddenly of a heart attack. We never met in person, nor did we communicate in any way after that first exchange of letters. The sum total of all that my birth father passed on to me amounts to this: a completed health history form, my half-brother’s positive DNA match, and the subsequent knowledge that I am Native American.

So, my smile over having filled in the ethnicity box on the course application was about this: knowing and claiming. Knowing who I am and where I came from and claiming my true heritage.

I’m aware my chances of gaining admission into the elite, memoir writing program are small. Yet, ten years ago, I knew nothing about my birth relatives, my family health history, or my genealogy. For decades, I never expected to own any of that. Life is about taking chances, assimilating rejection, and getting back out there.  Writing encompasses those same things.

Sitting back in my desk chair, I kept smiling and pressed submit, and then I thanked my birth dad. If my age was to be a deduct to the admission committee, I hoped my writing skills and heritage would shift the selection process in my favor.

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